No 7. Religion should again be allowed, when not encouraged, to play a role in political and social life.
From the evangelicals of the United States to the followers of popes
John Paul 11 and Benedict XV1, to the Islamists of the Middle East,
the claim about the benefits of religion is one of the great, and all
too little challenged impostures of our time. For centuries, those
aspiring to freedom and democracy, be it in Europe or the Middle East,
fought to push back the influence of religion on public life.
Secularism cannot guarantee freedom, but, against the claims of
tradition and superstition, the uses to which religion is put in
modern political life, from California to Kuwait, it is an essential
bulwark.
My Reply:
It seems that in modern times, challenges to religion in general mostly take the form of challenges to the idea of divinity, in other words 'strong' atheism. I call it strong because in decrying all faith in the metaphysical, these proponents of godlessness do not seem to recognise that their own position is a metaphysical one, and thus is very much a faith in its own right. Much more has been said on this topic, with much greater clarity, on Chris Bateman's blog. Of especial interest here is Popper's milestone, which is a lemma about the boundary between science and metaphysics that says - he proposed that falsification be used as a boundary condition for science, and consequently that anything that could not be falsified belonged to the domain of metaphysics.
This milestone seems to offer a potential resolution to the issue of church-in-state. Religions are faith-based systems of belief which posit a theory of existence, and derive from their beliefs a set of ethics which are used to guide day-to-day behaviour in social interaction. The faith-based theories of existence are clearly metaphysics, by Popper's milestone, since we cannot falsify the claim of the existence of God/gods/Brahmin/Tao/etc (the last, personally, is my favourite divinity).
Sets of ethics, on the other hand, are theories of optimum social behaviour which apply absolute values to variable circumstances. It is written: Thou shalt not kill. It is not thereafter written in parentheses: unless your government tells you to. So ethical models derived from religious principles are clearly flawed in application to everyday life. But as models applied to everyday life, they do deal with finite, measurable data, and the quality of life derived from their application should stand as a measure of falsifiability of their claim to be optimal systems for living. So religiously-derived ethics can theoretically be placed in the realm of social science, and this means they are subject to the same checks and balances as all secular systems of government of social interaction must be.
The upshot is, if religions were capable or willing of having their ethical systems subjected to scientific analysis, I see no reason not to give them credence in the application to government of social interaction. The ethics may be derived from nonsense for all I care, if they can be proven to work, then why not? The trick to having this outlook comes uniquely from computer science, namely machine learning. For many given problems, if you know the variables, constraints and computational requirements, you can set up a process called a genetic algorithm that essentially goes from being a completely arbitrary, random set of numbers, to a complete and optimal solution. It will work as long as you set the right constraints and evolutionary process. So its not so insane to think of allowing religions (arbitrary, random) to set up and run societies, as long as you've got suitable constraints and evolutionary process.
The image at top is the Palazzo in the Piazo di San Marco in Venice, the winged lion rampant.
12 comments:
I find it absurd that the only ideologies that can be excluded from politics are those that can be characterised as 'religions'. Do we seriously think, after Stalin's Russia, than nonreligious ideologies are any better?
The problem is not religion per se, which can be seen as a collection of ethical and metaphysical narratives and aphorisms, but the exclusionary dominance of fanatical ideologies of any kind.
And on this problem, we have yet to truly break ground.
(Feeling very special reading your posts... I worry sometimes that only the theists take me seriously. :-} )
And yet you have to wonder if we would still be living in caves were it not for the human predisposition towards fanaticism?
So many great things (admittedly mostly in the area of technology, the rampant misuse of which is destroying our planet) have been created because of the great overwhelming belief of certain parties, that these great things were necessary to enforce their own, or oppose another's, fanatical self-belief.
Chris - On the subject of your blog, I see in it a good example of a kind of forum only recently possible, and which I would like to promote among intellectuals of an elder generation who have a lot to say on the modern world but perhaps not enough of a forum in which to do it. I'm starting with my parents, and telling them about blogs has prompted my mother to propose these delusions in a series of emails - she left me the work of posting them all :-/
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Hello all!
actually, that's brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to pass that on to a couple of people.
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